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Aleksander Smolar (b. 1940) is a Polish writer, political activist and adviser, vice-president of the Institute for Human Sciences and president of the Stefan Batory Foundation. [Listener: Vitek Tracz]
TRANSCRIPT: When I think about it, my later friendships were all primarily political. That doesn't mean that there weren't any personal elements – they were very important. One of the people who were and are most important to me, even though he's a lot younger than I am was Adam Michnik whom I met when I was already at university. He was still at school then and was running the Seekers of Contradiction Club; they wanted to move to the university. He came to me and we became friends. I was fascinated by him – we became quite good friends – by his intelligence, his sense of humour, a certain brazenness, I mean he would make friends with everyone straight away, treating professors like his close buddies. He was very knowledgeable and intelligent right from the start and very warm and welcoming. Later, we were also connected through our activities namely, our involvement with the various opposition groups. After I'd left, these contacts naturally grew weaker and relied on telephone conversations or other people. I remember one fairly crucial exchange of information, a recording made by his friends about him – I'm referring to the opposition that was just being formed after my departure – there was a growing closeness which many of us, myself included, found shocking, of that post-commando or post-March group with groups that were aligned with the Church, with the intelligentsia, Catholic intelligentsia clubs, those kinds of people. Krzysztof Śliwiński was there, I remember meeting him especially so that he could tell me what was happening in those groups. He was going to Africa, I can't remember which country in Africa, but he had a professorship and spent several years out there lecturing. We met – I was living in Aix-en-Provence at the time – we met in the South of France, on the coast of the Mediterranean but in Italy; I drove there. We spent the entire day there, swimming, talking on the beach and he told me, among other things, about the convergence of these two groups which didn't have a great deal in common with one another.
